“I am going to see that young man’s General,”
Thomson replied. “I shall cross over to-day
and be back to-morrow night or Saturday morning.”

General Brice nodded thoughtfully.

“Perhaps you are right,” he assented.
“Yes, I shall have a few reports. You’d
better let them know at the Admiralty, and what time
you want to go over.”

Surgeon-Major Thomson shook hands with the General
and turned towards the door.

“When I come back,” he said, “I
hope I’ll be able to convince even you, sir.”

CHAPTER X

Surgeon-Major Thomson awoke about twelve hours later
with a start. He had been sleeping so heavily
that he was at first unable to remember his whereabouts.
His mind moved sluggishly across the brief panorama
of his hurried journey—­the special train
from Victoria to Folkestone; the destroyer which had
brought him and a few other soldiers across the Channel,
black with darkness, at a pace which made even the
promenade deck impossible; the landing at Boulogne,
a hive of industry notwithstanding the darkness; the
clanking of waggons, the shrieking of locomotives,
the jostling of crowds, the occasional flashing of
an electric torch. And then the ride in the great
automobile through the misty night. He rubbed
his eyes and looked around him. A grey morning
was breaking. The car had come to a standstill
before a white gate, in front of which was stationed
a British soldier, with drawn bayonet. Surgeon-Major
Thomson pulled himself together and answered the challenge.

“A friend,” he answered,—­“Surgeon-Major
Thomson, on his Majesty’s service.”

He leaned from the car for a moment and held out something
in the hollow of his hand. The man saluted and
drew back. The car went along a rough road which
led across a great stretch of pastureland. On
the ridge of the hills on his right, little groups
of men were at work unlimbering guns. Once or
twice, with a queer, screeching sound, a shell, like
a little puff of white smoke, passed high over the
car and fell somewhere in the grey valley below.
In the distance he could see the movements of a body
of troops through the trees, soldiers on the way to
relieve their comrades in the trenches. As the
morning broke, the trenches themselves came into view—­long,
zig-zag lines, silent, and with no sign of the men
who crawled about inside like ants. He passed
a great brewery transformed into a canteen, from which
a line of waggons, going and returning, were passing
all the time backwards and forwards into the valley.
Every now and then through the stillness came the
sharp crack of a rifle from the snipers lying hidden
in the little stretches of woodland and marshland
away on the right. A motor-omnibus, with its advertisement
signs still displayed but a great red cross floating
above it, came rocking down the road on its way to
the field hospital in the distance. As yet, however,
the business of fighting seemed scarcely to have commenced.